Coming Back Home

I wandered into the barn while she went into the office. Like a lot of local kids, I'd worked here one summer, stall-mucker and hay-spreader. It wasn't my favorite job, but it did earn me a down payment on my first truck. If only Caroline Frey, who rode exercise, had noticed me, it would have been a good time. But nerdy sixteen-year-olds aren't high on pretty seventeen-year-old girls' priority lists.

Down the long row, I saw a woman come out of a stall, bundled up against the cold like I was and carrying a bag. She gave me a perfunctory smile as she passed by on her way to the office. "Carrie's interviewing someone right now," I said, as she reached for the door handle. She turned back to me and I suddenly felt rude. "Sorry, I shouldn't have butted in like that."

She shook her head. "It's okay. I'm not in a hurry." She flopped down on the bench outside the office, setting her bag at her feet.

I noticed the caduceus emblem with the V over it. "You don't look like Jim Harvey."

Her eyebrows went up. "I'm glad to hear that," she said. I could hear the brush-off and read the body language of eyes that met mine precisely as long as it took to say that and then looked away. I gave her a smile that was probably ninety-five percent grimace and stepped outside. Somehow, the chill from the gust of wind that slipped under the neck of my jacket seemed warmer than the metaphorical one inside.

Half an hour later Madison came back out, looking happier than I'd seen her. "Five hours a day," she said.

"More than I expected. I hope you were honest with Carrie that it's a short-term thing?"

She nodded. "I explained. She said we'd deal with that when it came up."

She was quiet the rest of the trip to the diner for the long-delayed coffee. We got a booth and ordered some food since it was later than I normally came in. Then we sat in silence for a while. To me, it was normal, but she looked uncomfortable. I figured I might as well find out more about my unexpected housemate.

"Where are you from?"

"Oregon." That was a surprise. Even though the birth certificate tucked in her pack had said she was born in Medford, I'd assumed she was more local now. "I know, long way away," she said. "I came out to Boston to see my dad. I saw him but it was only for a short visit and here I am."

"But not heading back to Oregon?"

She shook her head, toying with her spoon. I wasn't sure where to go from there. Asking, "Why not?" seemed intrusive so I tried, "No other family?"

"In Oregon." Oh. The flat tone let me know I'd stepped in it. She glanced up at my face then looked away out the window. "I'm not wanted by the cops or anything if that's what you're thinking."

"I wasn't," I said truthfully.

She nodded and continued staring out the window. Then, in a quieter voice, "I had issues with my stepdad." She left it at that. Again, I sat there silently. It's how I normally spent my time there, other than some idle chatter with one or two of the waitresses if things aren't busy.

Apparently, however, silent table partners unnerved Madison a little because she started over-sharing. Really over-sharing, from my point of view. My parents had operated on the principle of: if we want to know something, we'll ask you directly and you better tell the truth. Otherwise, keep it to yourself. They loved me dearly, but they were big on independence.

"I was on the pill for my complexion, and my stepdad saw them one day. That night he came into my room and told me that, if I was keeping the high school boys happy, there's no reason I couldn't keep him happy, too."

I ignored the spike of anger that shot through me. I had no idea how to respond to a woman saying something like that.

"I managed to get him out of my room by threatening to scream, but I knew he'd be back. My mom travels sometimes for her job, and he and I were alone in the house a lot."

I kept my voice level. "What happened then?"

"I told my mom. She slapped me and told me that she was ashamed that I'd lie about a good man just because I resented the fact that he'd replaced my worthless father. Then she called Dave—that's his name, Dave—into the room, told him what I'd said, and told me to apologize for lying."

"Did you?"

She smirked. "She thinks I did. I was, like, 'I'm sorry I said that to my mother.' She didn't realize all I was saying was that I was sorry I went to her. Dave knew though."

"Did he call you out on it?"

"No. He gave me this look that let me know it wasn't over. So, that night I grabbed my pack, my birth certificate, and stuff, and took off. I swiped all the cash in their wallets and her ATM card. I didn't know the PIN to his or I'd have taken it too. I could only get $300 at one time and then I ditched the card. I didn't want them tracing me by it."

"I doubt your mother would throw you in jail no matter how pissed off she was."

She shook her head. "Not that. I didn't want to have to go back. I was a minor."

I was surprised. I'd checked her age on her birth certificate when I poked through her pack to know if I was dealing with dynamite. It's how I knew she was eighteen.

She read my reaction correctly. "It was Labor Day. My birthday is in October. I've been gone for five months." She shrugged like it didn't matter. "I went to see my dad in Boston. I couldn't buy a plane ticket because they said my parents had to do it if I wasn't eighteen, so I spent three days on a bus from Oregon to Massachusetts. That sucked!"

"If you were only seventeen, why didn't you stay with your dad?" I figured that question needed to be asked.

"His new wife didn't want me there," she said tightly, "and she said—" She broke off and started sliding out of the booth. "I need a ladies' room."

I wasn't fooled. I'd seen the expression on her face when she stood, and the scrubbed look and red around the eyes when she returned made it clear she'd been crying. I dropped a few bills on the table before she could sit. "Let's head back to the house."

It was a quiet ride for the first five minutes. Then she said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

After another uncomfortable silence, she finished her story. "She told me why my dad left my mom when I was eleven: he found out I wasn't his daughter."

Jesus! What was it with her blurting this stuff out? That was the second time in the last fifteen minutes that I didn't know what to say. Even if it upset her, the truth seemed like the best bet. "After eleven years, you should have been, regardless of what happened in the past."

She looked over at me with an expression I couldn't quite fathom: either it was a "Yeah" of agreement, or it was, "Are you from planet Mars?" She glanced back out the window. "Since then, I've just been trying to get by on my own. But I've had trouble making it, and the cold has been getting to me, so here I am."

"Well, there's no evil stepmother at my house to throw you out," I said, trying to lighten the mood. "You can stay until you're on your feet again."

"I don't know how to repay you for all this."

"No hurry," I said dismissively. "You thank me when you figure it out."

The rest of the day she was a ghost around the house. I needed to get some work done, so I told her I would be busy at the desk in my room. "I'll be in there until bedtime, so just help yourself to anything in the kitchen, and I'll see you in the morning."

That's not my usual routine. Normally, I work until eight or nine and then move downstairs and put the television on. But like the night before, it seemed the best bet was to remove myself. When my last conference call finished, I lay down on top of the bed to read. I heard the shower start and figured I'd give it another ten or fifteen minutes and head down. I was just finishing a chapter when I heard a light knock at the door.

"Yeah?"

It opened to show Madison standing there in a robe I'd lent her. She stepped in and reached back to shut the door. What? Barely meeting my eyes, she walked over to the edge of the bed. Her hands fumbled at the belt of the robe for a second and then it dropped off her body. Topless, just a pair of panties below, she reached for the covers on the edge of the bed.

"Whoa! Madison!"

She looked me directly in the face for the first time. "Thank you, Will, for everything." She started to slide in.

I scooted back, understanding. "Stop! Right now. Just stop." She froze. I slid off the other side of the bed and walked around, scooping up the robe from the floor. "Put this on, please." She clutched it to her chest but didn't put it on. "What's this about?"

"I wanted to say thank you. It's okay."

"No."

She got a startled look. "Oh! Do you, umm, not like girls?"

I laughed, but it was a tense one. "I like girls plenty. But no."

"Why?"

"Because ..." I was stymied for how to explain my feelings, mostly because I was so off-balance with the whole thing. "I guess because you're eighteen."

"That's legal."

"I know but ..." I struggled to put it into words. "Look, if you weren't homeless, having family problems, and desperate to have a place where you won't starve or freeze to death, would you really look at a thirty-five-year-old guy?" I shook my head. "No, you wouldn't."

She didn't respond. I didn't expect her to. If she agreed, she'd be telling me she didn't find me attractive, and I had a feeling she was afraid of insulting me.

I ignored the tiny part of my brain that woke up at the whole porn-fantasy aspect of this—I said it had been a while—and shut down the situation. She was cute as hell, but she was little more than half my age. "I don't care how attractive you are ... and you are ... there's a part of me that knows this is creepy. And that's the part that I'd have to live with. So, no. Period. And please put that robe on."

I looked away as her chest came back into view while she pulled the robe around her. "Jesus!" I muttered. I saw her eyes start to tear up. "What?" I demanded.

"Please don't throw me out. I misunderstood."

"I'm not going to throw you out. Just stop crying." I ran my fingers through my hair as I tried to figure out what to do. Now that I wasn't faced with a topless, cute young woman, it was easier to get my balance back. "Look, when I said, 'figure it out,' I wasn't implying figure out how a woman could reward a guy. I meant figure your life out. And by 'thank me,' I meant with words."

She still looked scared and a little desperate but at least the waterworks held off.

I shook my head. "I ..." I had to look away; this was unbearably awkward. "Maybe it's my bad. I saw the look on your face last night when we came up the stairs, what you expected was going to happen. I should have said something then, but I'm not good at knowing what to say sometimes."

"You knew? I'm ..." Her voice trailed off. I could see that, now that panic was ebbing a little, she was as embarrassed as I was: a pair of tongue-tied strangers trying to have a conversation. "I'm not a whore, Will," she said very quietly.

That one was easier to field. "I never thought you were. I just figured it wasn't the first time you had to make some hard choices. I figured that was why you bailed in Ligonier."

I glanced over to see if that hit the mark and saw her eyes start to water again. "Now why are you crying?" I asked in exasperation.

"Because all guys aren't like you."

"Jesus! I'm going downstairs to watch some TV. I'll see you in the morning." I shoved my feet into slippers, grabbed a robe for myself, and bolted.

When she came into the kitchen the next morning, it was awkward. I dealt with it the way I normally did: said nothing and turned my attention to making pancakes. She, apparently, had a different set of social responses wired in.

"Will?"

I sighed and turned to her.

"Last night—" she started.

I cut her off. "Look. I'm super uncomfortable with this kind of conversation. Just do me a favor and pretend it never happened."

"But I don't want you to think—"

I cut her off again. "I don't. I meant what I said: I figured you had to make some unhappy choices, but I don't judge you for them. I just don't want to talk about stuff like this with someone half my age. God! I can barely talk to women my own age." I saw a small flicker of amusement cross her face at that.

"Go ahead. Smirk. I write software for a living," I said defiantly. "Guess what that means about my social skill with girls." My face flushed, I turned back to the stove. "Let's just drop it," I muttered.

She said nothing. After a moment she went over and got two plates, some silverware, and pulled the maple syrup out of the pantry. It was a quiet meal. I was embarrassed. I don't know what she was thinking.

"I have to walk the dog," I announced.

She looked surprised; there'd been no sign of a dog since she arrived. "He stays with my neighbor," I said. Opening the back door, I gave a two-tone whistle. Seconds later, I watched Madison's face crease into a smile as forty pounds of black and white sailed over the three-foot hedge as if it wasn't even there and came bounding inside to dance around in front of me in excitement.

"This is Lucy. Just put your hand out and let her sniff you. She won't bite." Lucy crept over and gave Madison a sniff or two, then one quick lick on the hand before darting back to me, her entire back end wagging as her tail whacked the hell out of the lower cabinet.

It was a long walk while I tried to get my head around the previous evening. The thing was, Madison had the kind of looks that I'd always loved. Maybe a touch under-nourished, but she had a girl-next-door quality that caught the eye. And a little part of me had reacted, had said, "Hey, you could have that."

How am I different from Dave? I wondered. It took me a while to get unrattled enough to answer that. It wasn't that he liked her looks; she was attractive, and the eye likes what the eye likes. It was that he acted on it when he knew he shouldn't. He was her stepfather, for Christ's sake! Not even some rando guy she made an offer to.

More than that.

It was that he demanded and then didn't accept her "get lost." For those two things, I'd cheerfully have beaten him to a pulp even though she was nobody to me.

I relaxed, finally finding my perspective. I'd said no even though she'd given me the exact opposite of "get lost." I didn't need to add this to the list of things I felt bad about myself over.

We got back from our trek through the woods and I started in on splitting some wood. With temperatures like these, the wood stove got hungry. We weren't having the "snowmageddon" of two years ago, but 2012 was holding its own. Lincoln's birthday had met us with over a foot of new snow followed by bitter temperatures that had only eased slightly.

Splitting wood is a peaceful thing for me. Slow at first until my body warmed up enough that I could shed the heavy coat and get into the rhythm. Earphones on with music I liked—Pearl Jam today—to isolate me from the sounds of cars going by. Just me and the ax and the lengths of log. I kept Doug in wood also, finally convincing him I enjoyed it rather than was just coddling him.

After a couple of minutes, Madison came out.

"Do you need some help?" she asked tentatively after I dropped one earbud out.

"It's a one-man job. You could take a carrier-full of kindling in if you want." I gestured to the pile of smaller wood off to the side. "There's a box for it next to the wood stove."

Lucy chose that moment to come bounding by, hot in pursuit of a bird that was twenty feet up in the air. Hope sprang ever-eternal in that dog's heart.

"Why does your dog live with your neighbor?"

I paused. "I can't talk and swing an ax. Give me a few minutes and I'll come in." Turning back to the chopping block, I saw Doug open his back door. He was poker-faced as always, but his eyes were on Madison. I waved him over.

"This is my neighbor, Doug," I said to Madison as he walked up. She was watching Lucy, who had given up the bird for lost and had come over to see if anyone wanted to throw a stick. "This is Madison," I said to him. "She's staying with me for a while."

He gave her a brief nod, his face still impassive. I could see she wasn't sure how to deal with that beyond a quiet hello, so she covered her uncertainty by picking up the stick Lucy had dropped and threw it. Both Doug and I fought grins as Lucy took off like a shot, caught the stick on its first tumble, and came racing back to drop it at Madison's feet, staring at it with that fixated expression border collies have perfected.

"She knows you're a sucker now," Doug observed.

"Madison needs a ride over to Bothwell at two-thirty and I have a call at two," I said. "Any chance you could take her?"

"Sure. Just come over," he said to her. He gave another of those nods to her, an expressionless glance at me, and turned back to his place, calling Lucy as he went.

Between filling the wood box and then showering and dressing, I chewed up the better part of an hour. I came down to find the breakfast dishes clean and drying in the rack. Madison was sitting at the table waiting.

"Will, I need one or two things from the store. Can you tell me where it is?"

"There's a small one about a mile down to the left but it's pretty cold outside. I usually go for a coffee at around ten thirty. If you want to come, we can stop. If you don't, I'll pick it up for you."

"I'll come with you then if that's okay."

Just then the phone rang. It was the Hyderabad team. After thirty seconds of listening, I realized this was another one of the all-hands-on-deck "emergencies" the idiotic project manager called whenever something went wrong. Eleven people would sit around on a conference call doing nothing while one person fixed the problem he or she'd caused. I sighed and muted my line. "Is your stuff urgent?" I asked Madison. She shook her head. "Have Doug stop when he takes you. This will take a bit."

It was a little after seven thirty when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I looked out the window, and when Madison opened the passenger side, it looked like the driver was the woman I'd run into earlier. I opened the door—I wasn't quite ready to trust Madison with a key—and told her, "Dinner in a few minutes if you want to wash up."

It was another quiet affair. Toward the end of it, she spoke up. "Doug asked me what I thought of you. Doesn't he know you?"

"What did you say?"

She wriggled a little but answered. "I told him you seemed nice." I could hear the caution lurking behind her words.

I didn't want to make her more uncomfortable, so I answered her question mildly, "Doug's known me since I was young. He's just making sure you're okay. He's that kind of guy."

I started to head to my room, then turned back. "Who drove you home?"

"Her name's Avery. She's working there part-time and said she'd give me rides."

The next day was pretty much a repeat. I continued to sit utterly bored on the phone while the team fixed problem after problem in their latest upgrade effort. Since my stuff was working properly, I managed to work my way through a fair bit of Russell's Swamplandia!.

Madison seemed slightly more comfortable with her situation. Truthfully, I didn't have a whole lot invested in her, and if she went, she went. Still, it was nice to have someone to talk to over dinner, and I did feel good about myself for helping her out. Part of the whole rebuild-self-image process.

The only thing different the third day wasn't a change for the better. It was slightly warmer, and I was out on a ladder doing a little repair to a gutter that had been damaged by a combination of ice and wind.

Avery pulled up to take Madison to work, giving a little toot of the horn to let her know she was there. I gave her a brief nod. She'd made it clear the first day that talking to her wasn't welcome, and I'd had a lot of practice in just not giving a damn when people didn't want to talk to me.